BUILDING A CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS

There has been a discernible shift on the World Wide Web from basic text pages to the use of more complex information structuring techniques such as lists, tables and frames, and multimedia elements such as imagemaps, video and virtual reality. These advances make the interface more information rich for the sighted user, but make life more difficult for the visually impaired user who can only ‘read’ the textual part of the interface using speech synthesis. The aim the project is to present as much real information contained in the Web page to the visually impaired user as possible. The experimental work described in this paper was aimed at determining how best to sort, group, and annotate the information contained in a Web page to promote the most effective conceptual model in the user.